


Remembrance

by lotusorlilith



Series: Their Greatest Tragedies [1]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare, The Last Hours Series - Cassandra Clare, The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28826349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotusorlilith/pseuds/lotusorlilith
Summary: On Jem Carstairs's first day as a Silent Brother, he gives himself the name Zachariah after an encounter with a mysterious ghost girl.[Warning: Jem is romantically & sexually attracted to both Tessa and Will. ]
Relationships: Jem Carstairs & Tessa Gray, Jem Carstairs & Will Herondale, Jem Carstairs/Tessa Gray, Jem Carstairs/Tessa Gray/Will Herondale, Jem Carstairs/Will Herondale
Series: Their Greatest Tragedies [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2113587
Kudos: 20





	Remembrance

Jem Carstairs stares at his new staffs, thumbs brushing over the initials on their heads. _W.H.,_ it says. The letters' edge is still sharp; it will take a while before it stops cutting his palms. 

Jem, no, it's Brother Something now, before he figures out a name for himself. Mundanes who became shadowhunters give up their names too. Be it Smith, Jiu, or Akasaki, he who drinks from the Mortal Cup bears the name of Jonathan Shadowhunter. _Would they remember what it was like before the Ascension?_

Jem realizes that he has been roaming subconsciously to the wall, his newly transformed body still seeking a window for sunlight and breeze. There are no windows in the Silent City, only the bones of long-gone shadowhunters and the wind that echos among the hollow of the skulls.

Jem touches a skull on the wall with a finger. His finger feels alien. It still is slender and scarred, but an invisible part of it had been altered during the ritual, forever changed by the runes that freeze him in his youth. He gazes at it as if to see through the bones and veins underneath. 

"Are you the new Silent Brother?"

Jem was almost startled. The Silent Brothers move soundlessly and converse in each other's minds; thus, the Silent City is eerily quiet. But this person is not speaking in his mind; Jem turns around and sees a ghost, candlelight shimmers through her wavy hair. There is a tinge of familiarity on her face, but he cannot decipher it.

"I am," Jem says in his mind.

"That's my skull you are touching," she giggles, covering her mouth with a tiny hand. There is a huge gash from the bottom of her jaw all the way to her chest.

"My apologies, lady." Jem retracts his finger, "I didn't know ghosts are guarding the Silent City." In fact, he didn't know ghosts exist except for Jessamine.

"I'm not guarding this place," she looks even younger than Jem himself, "Just roaming around." She spins, making her dress swirl like flower petals. "Do you have a name yet?"

_I am Jem Carstairs, Ke Jian Ming. I am and always will be._ He thought of the joy in his mother's eyes when she gave him that name. Jian means sword and Ming music. He thought of the black-haired boy with eyes a profound blue, calling him Jem for the first time. He remembers the details well, but the emotions are barred from him now. His memories of Will's eyes make him feel like he is looking through thick glass. He cannot _feel._

So Jem only shakes his head.

"But someone remembers you, even after you leave your old life behind." Her eyes land on his faded rune, "You have a parabatai." Her eyes linger on his hand, on the pale knuckle clearly missing a ring, "And a fiancée. Do you love them?"

"Of course," Jem's eyebrows crunched. The question is almost offensive – how could one stop loving his own soul?

"They will remember you until the end of their days, but will you remember them?"

"Of course."

The girl chuckles, "Wrong. There will be a day when you look at their portrait and think to yourself, who is that?"

Jem is rarely offended, even when he was a human teenager. But now anger rises up in his chest, and there is a ragged edge on his voice in his head, "I will not. Now, young lady, if you would excuse me -"

He moves towards the door, had almost left the room when he heard, "Would you like to hear a story?"

If he was some other less patient shadowhunter, he would have left the room. But Jem is Jem; he stops in his track.

"Three hundred years ago, there was a pair of shadowhunter siblings. They lost their parents during a war. All they had was each other. The brother promised the sister that he would always keep her safe. 'In a world haunted by demons, my dearest Alyssa, I will be your guardian angel.' He would hold her in his arms and tell her again and again when she was too afraid or too hungry to sleep. He would trace his finger on her temple, writing, 'Alyssa, Alyssa, Alyssa,' as if it was the only word that mattered in the entire world. She thought she could have him forever."

Her eyes flicker, "But then she died. The demon that killed their parents tracked them down and tore her throat out in front of him. He was so gifted at medicine, but he could only watch her die grasping his arms, choking on her own blood."

Jem feels as if there is a lump in his throat, "Alyssa, I am so -"

"No, the story did not end there, for not even death could do them apart. The brother pleaded to the Angel that if he could not guard her in life, let him do so in her eternal sleep. He came to the Silent City, her bones carefully kept in his parcel. He let them carve the runes of Silent Brotherhood so he would never have to leave her side."

Alyssa looks at Jem, her eyes glistening in the candlelight. That tinge of familiarity surges through the curves of her cheekbones, undamaged by runes.

"I am the sister of Vincent Baybrook, or should I call him Brother Enoch?"

Enoch. _Vowed and dedicated._

For hundreds of years, Brother Enoch has been the face of Silent Brothers. In his eyes hide all the secrets of the Shadow World through the centuries.

But he has never mentioned a sister.

Though no longer needed to breathe, Jem feels the air leaving his lungs. A realization dawns on him, almost too great and too grave to bear.

"This was his room," Alyssa's translucent fingers brush over the jagged edge of the ash wood table.

"At the beginning, he would tell jokes to me, would tell me that rats in the wall were nibbling at my skull. He would laugh at me for being scared of the dark, being a ghost myself. We would lie side by side on this bed. I was a ghost, and he a Silent Brother, and neither of us needed sleep. But we still lay there, just like when we were little and alive."

"I couldn't count how many years had passed. All I could tell was that he was changing. His human habits, how he would still breathe without the need for air, how he would still lay down at night even the need for sleep was gone from him. Slowly, he stopped making me laugh. He stopped coming to bed. He stopped breathing. He was more dead than I, although his heart was still beating. And one day, I woke up to see letters carved on the wall beside me, etched deep into the wall, desperation seeping through the strokes. It read, 'ALYS,' the S only had the upper half, as if the person forgot what to do halfway through it. I sat up and saw him. His lips were trembling as if a word was tearing its way out of the stitches. But he could not say it. He had forgotten my name."

"That is impossible," Jem says quietly, the voice in his head shaking. "Brother Enoch can recount the fall of the Byzantine Empire like the back of his hand. He makes the most complex medicinal potions without flipping a page. Silent Brothers do not forget; Brother Enoch does not forget."

"The runes of the Silent Brotherhood strips of one's humanity piece by piece, just like warlocks removing each other's memories from time to time. Eternity is unbearable when you remember everything. The pain of knowing that your heart would never be mended again, that your wounds would never heal with time – it would tear you apart. You are right, Brother Enoch doesn't forget," Alyssa's voice light and soft like the wind that gently rattles the bones of the Silent City. "But Vincent Baybrook did."

Jem's hands tightened into fists. The rough hardness of his staffs scrapes his bones. 

He conjures his memories.

The hem of Tessa's green dress billowing in the Spring breeze. Will's tousled hair after a bath, his neck smell of pine and fresh grass. Tessa's gray eyes gleaming into his as she agreed to his proposal. Will interlinked his fingers with his through a ring of fire, a small smile tucking at the corner of his mouth. Tessa, Will; Will, Tessa. The first and last of his dreams, the one and only life he has ever craved for.

He has thought of Will olding, hair graying, wrinkles climbing up the corner of his eyes. His gait unsteady, his brain no longer agile. But at least Jem would be there with him till the very end. And Tessa, too; She would hold his hand, singing him a lullaby as gentle and sweet as Tessa herself. He will be loved until the very last second of his life and beyond.

But now, fear strikes Jem like a roaring hurricane. His hands are tremoring, despite the powerful runes that keep even the hem of his robe still in the wildest of winds.

If he forgets.

He sees Will on his deathbed. His eyes, once startlingly blue but now clouded by age, search for his parabatai, with whom he had made an unbreakable pact to wait for on the brink of the River Lethe. Instead, he sees only an emotionless Silent Brother, a hollow shell of the man he loved and now lost. 

Tessa takes his hand, her hands small, warm, and human. Touching her used to make his heart flutter, but now he only thinks of what is underneath. Ligaments, tendons, bones, and muscles interlacing each other into a complex web that he has learned by heart over the decades. Anything but the hand of the woman he loves.

He thinks of the words that burst into his heart during the last seconds of his human life; the urge to take his parabatai apart and to be taken apart by him; the part of himself that Jem had been denying and repressing. It was after his parabatai rune had faded and before the Brotherhood ones took effect -for an infinitesimal moment, he was neither a Shadowhunter nor a Silent Brother. He was a mere man, made of flesh and blood, fear and desire, who has found two great loves in his mortal life. Brotherhood has stripped him of the possibility to ever confess this love, but what cannot be said must at least be remembered. 

He grabs his staffs so tightly that the letters are scraping his palms raw. Jem feels a desperate need for air. He gasps, but his lips won't part. He chokes on the vacuum in his lungs.

Alyssa watches him; her expression is indecipherable. She whispers, "Today is my last day."

"What do you mean?"

"I remained because I couldn't bear leaving my brother alone in this world. But I no longer have a brother. I came here to say goodbye to this table that we used to sit at, solving puzzles together, to this candelabra that I hit his head with once because he wouldn't stop telling me spooky stories and then wouldn't stop laughing at me for being a ghost who feared her like," She smiles, a guileless one that radiates like the sunshine she has not seen in three hundred years. "Now I must go. Shatter my skull, for no one will remember me anymore."

"I will."

"I don't even know your name," Alyssa says, her body turning more and more transparent, her golden hair blending into the candlelight.

"It's Jem," he says.

"That name no longer belongs to you."

Jem's thumbs are still, hovering upon the initials. The absence of his family ring sends a hollow pain to the bottom of his heart. He thinks of the words that have died and will die in his throat in the eternity that stretches ahead. 

His fingers trace the outlines of the letter freshly carved. The edges glimmer red. 

His blood. Bright. Running. _Human._

_Will, there is something I have to let you know. Tessa, I need you to know about this as well._

Remember. 

He feels the touch of his brown-haired girl on the inside of his wrist. 

_I take thee, Theresa Gray, as my wedded wife._

Remember.

_The three of us, hopelessly in love with one another._

Remember.

"Zachariah."

"Pardon?" Alyssa lifts her gaze to meet his; her eyes are a pale, glimmering blue.

Jem Carstairs looks into those blue eyes, and as the last trace of her disappear into the cold, still air of the Silent City, he hears himself clear in his head. 

"My name is Brother Zachariah."

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! This is the first part of a 3-part series called Their Greatest Tragedies. Parts 2 and 3 will be from Will and Tessa's perspectives, respectively. 
> 
> This was written on January the 17th of 2021, the same day as Hack the North! This means that I was extremely sleep deprived throughout the 6 hours writing this, having just finished a 40-hour hackathon with three friends.


End file.
